


Sleepless Nights

by CaptainLeBubbles



Series: The Way It Changes [9]
Category: Red vs. Blue
Genre: Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-14
Updated: 2015-03-14
Packaged: 2018-03-17 20:00:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 769
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3542030
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CaptainLeBubbles/pseuds/CaptainLeBubbles
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Wash can't sleep, he counts.</p><p>When Maine can't sleep, he prowls.</p><p>When Carolina can't sleep, she trains.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sleepless Nights

**Author's Note:**

> Takes place during the three weeks I have arbitrarily stuck between when they crashed on Chorus and when Carolina and Epsilon took off.

o/o

*

When Wash can't sleep, he counts.

It doesn't really matter what- when he was a small boy, it was non-existent sheep and he'd just carried the habit from there. His mother's footfalls when she paced the house, his father's snores, the beats of his sister's music, muffled on the other side of his bedroom wall. The cars driving by outside; the stars just visible through his window. Anything, it's the act of counting itself that he needs.

Back on the Mother of Invention, it was the hum of the engine. He'd learned to catch the soft pulses, and by shutting out everything else he needed to he was able to shut off the things that made it hard for him sleep.

After Epsilon, when he had to spend a year in a padded room, he started counting heartbeats. There was nothing else to count, so he'd focused on his heart and just counted the beats.

Now he listens to Maine's heartbeat. Curls up with his head on Maine's chest and listens until all the other sounds are gone, and counts until he's silenced the voices and the memories and the dark, shadowy thoughts and sleep claims him once more.

*

When Maine can't sleep, he prowls.

Back on the Mother of Invention, there'd been the whole ship to prowl. Many a night-shift guard had had the bejeebus scared out of them by Maine's silent figure appearing behind them without warning. He didn't scare them on purpose, but it was still pretty funny.

He went to his friends' rooms, usually, always ended up there. He'd hack the access codes and stand silent in the doorway, focused on the sleeping lump that was them until the sounds of their sleep was all he could hear, and then he'd close the door just as silently and move on to the next one.

The base is a lot smaller than the Mother of Invention, and there's only four people besides himself, and he doesn't need access codes because they don't have doors. He prowls up and down the corridor, ears tuned, listening to the sounds of their sleep drifting through the non-existent doors.

Tucker's snores, which he swears waking he doesn't do. Caboose's quiet mumblings, alternating between Caboose-like nonsense and comments about engineering and theoretical VI and AI studies that are well beyond anything Maine would have thought him capable of understanding. Carolina's soft murmured conversation with Epsilon, because she doesn't sleep as often as she should. Wash's breathing, sometimes ragged and sometimes steady, sometimes interspersed with sobs.

He paces, and prowls, until their night-time sounds have pushed away the loud silence throbbing in his own mind and he goes back to bed, curling around Wash and listening to the sounds of his breathing until he drifts off to sleep.

*

When Carolina can't sleep, she trains.

It's a habit she picked up from her mother, which is not something she likes to think about very much. As a little girl, when Mama was home (so rare, she was always away, and in one of his kinder moments Epsilon had told her that's why the Director had pushed to get her assigned to Project Freelancer, because then she'd always be right there), she would wake to the sounds of Mama down in their personal gym, and gather her blankets around her and pad downstairs to sit in the doorway and watch until she'd fallen asleep.

She can still remember Mama carrying her upstairs and putting her back to bed when she had finally worn herself out enough for sleep to claim her, too.

On the Mother of Invention, frustration had often driven her to the training room floor, FILSS setting up round after round and declaring improvement percentages that Carolina ignored because it could be a one hundred percent improvement and it still wouldn't be enough for him. Some nights she would be aware of York up in the balcony, watching over her while she worked, but most nights it was just her and FILSS and that suited her.

They don't have a training room anymore. Their training is done outside, in the canyon, and she has to be careful she doesn't wake them so she goes up into the ship instead. She's set up a ring of punching bags there and she trains until they're all battered, ragged remains, when exhaustion has deadened the guilt that keeps her awake and she can barely stay up long enough to stagger back to her room and collapse on her cot and get a few hours sleep before it's time to wake up.

*

o/o

**Author's Note:**

> I have this headcanon about Caboose having specialized training in engineering and computer programming that is mostly inaccessible to him after Omega set up shop in his head.


End file.
